Please define "cannot sustain itself". The only evidence you provided is residence owenrship rates, which is not a valid comparison within the topic of debate.
Property markets vary worldwide, not just due to demand or supply, but also due to the local legal frameworks. North Continental Europe tends (as a generalisation across its many countries) to give a fair amount of rights to those renting. Redecorating, for example, is a right that my Continental neighbours have which as a UK resident I don't have as easily. If a UK renter wants to redecorate, they usually have to seek their landlord's approval - but if they were living in France, they wouldn't.
With greater rights and protection for tenants, many people in Germany and its neighbours probably never feel as great a need to own property. It's a simple trade-off - you own it, you get benefits like equity, but have to deal with all problems with the property. Don't own it, and you never get equity but your landlord has responsibilities. Now, in the UK, we have more restrictions as renters so ownership is more attractive. But in Germany or France, my understanding is that the better protection of tenants means that ownership is less attractive. Not unattractive - just not as attractive as in other territories.
So residence ownership isn't a good statistic to compare, as it has reasons beyond city design or population sustainability.
Although to be clear, I don't understand what either residence ownership or population sustainability have to do with the conversation here either. It seems like you're just clutching at straws to justify the American city design of Suburban Sprawl, rather than attempting to understand how other countries that are more land-constrained have dealt with the issue of city growth and the transport requirements it brings...
Nonsense. Oil already hit $120 a few years back, and I don't know anyone who had to chose between commuting and traveling. Even if it hits $200 per barrel 5 years from now, my car will be ready for replacement, and I can buy another one which uses half as much fuel.
Just so I'm clear on this... Your solution to "Fuel is getting more expensive, at some point I may not be able to commute" will be "I need to buy a new car".
Hmmm.
I think I'm beginning to see why America has such a large deficit...
I think you'll find it's giving significant advantage.
To the bank accounts of Intel and AMD, as it's giving people (often gamers) a "reason to upgrade"...;-)
Generally, though, I'd agree with you.
When I last bought a machine, it was before the time of Windows 7. 64-bit was an option, but not a good one. So I went with 32-bit and 4Gb of RAM, mostly because of reasons I suspect you'd agree with: a) For playing games under Windows, I lose nothing. A 768Mb graphics card means I lose 768Mb of RAM under Windows, but the game itself can only use 2Gb and that still leaves 1.3Gb for the OS to play in for disk cache. What's the problem? b) For doing anything productive I use Linux, where PAE allows all 4Gb to be used with no RAM loss, and no noticable performance hit. c) 64-bit Windows XP was utter crud, mostly because of driver issues.
64-bit is inevitable, but I wonder how many people will actually use it that much. People editing video at home stand more chance than the average gamer of using >4Gb. Try telling that to a gamer, though.;-)
For music, and movies, and so forth, anyway. It gives me freedom, to some degree. For instance, my collection of CDs is reasonable (500+), and some of them haven't been MP3'd yet. But worse, some were MP3'd years ago, at a low bit rate because when your player only has 64Mb of storage (yes, MEGAbytes - a Diamond Rio 500 - look it up!) you have to compromise a little.
I'm now slowly going through them and re-ripping at a much higher bitrate. In that scenario, having media wins.
However, I'm racking my brains trying to think why I'd want the media for games.
I had the media for games a while ago, and it was a PITA. I then bought the iD Complete Pack on Steam - every iD game up to that point. I still had my media for old iD games like Quake III and Quake III Arena, but installing via Steam was much easier. No mucking about with CDs, no hunting through packaging trying to find what the serial number's written on... And no having to find and download the patches, then install them - sometimes in a specific order.
With Steam and no physical media, I just download, copy the serial number, and go!
It's not like a re-install from original media would allow higher quality. Just more hassle.
I did once have an attachment to the original media for my games. Not any more. Not since I had to rebuild a machine and had to go off finding patches, hunt for lost manuals with serial numbers in them, and deal with scratched media. When I had a brand new machine later on, I just shuddered at the thought of the pain and time the physical media route would take. Then I saw the Complete Pack on Steam, and got my wallet out.
I can still just about see a point to having the media for music and video materials. But that's partly because backing up virtual only media (especially video) can take terabytes once you've got a reasonable collection. And partly because I'm loathe to do any encoding at anything but a very high quality level, as I've learnt my lesson!
I suspect that by the time I'm halfway through re-encoding my CDs, I'll be contemplating whether it's not just better to go looking at how much they'd cost to buy from Amazon or wherever... It may not stop me from re-encoding, but it might convince me it's not worth buying the physical media for my new music purchases any more...
Sad but true. It'll be the end of an era.
One final sad thought on the end of eras... I remember when albums had two sides. But right now it looks like I will have to explain to my children (well, my mates' children) that we once bought songs in bundles called Albums, on which the artists had sometimes painstakingly arranged songs into a specific order, for a certain effect. And that part of the pleasure of listening was to play the album, in order, to get that effect.
Well, it loses because you can't run a Microsoft solution on one box and be supported in 'production environments'.
With a FOSS solution, support isn't a huge issue. Because of that, what support you can get is often more flexible. So if you're throwing together a DEV or UAT environment, it's often an all-in-one box. Webserver, database, app daemons - everything on one box.
And you can deploy live that too, in your Production environment. You only need to break it apart into multiple boxes when you hit any kind of performance/scaling issue.
But the Microsoft Way is that all these things must be separate machines. And that ends up costing a lot of money, taking up a lot more time (because there are more machines to deal with), and generally being cumbersome.
Microsoft doesn't care that other solutions require less machines. They sell licenses. Not software - licenses. So to them, having a solution which requires three or four machines is actually a plus - more Windows licenses!
Case in point - I was recently involved in rolling out Office Communications Server (OCS), which does instant messaging/voice/video chat. We already have another system which also does IM/chat/voice. It requires two servers, and even then it only requires two because we want high availability - if one server/site dies, the other takes over.
Microsoft's OCS, to do the same job, requires three servers. Multiply by two to get high availability, and then add in an odd little beastie of a server which "monitors quality of service", and we have a total of... Seven servers. (The monitoring server can't be highly available, you see. No, don't ask. The answer will just make that dull throbbing pain in your skull worse...)
Two servers vs seven servers.
Microsoft's solution is not obviously better than the two server solution. They both have strengths and weaknesses. Overall, for our requirements, they're on a par with each other. But in terms of cost, Microsoft's solution requires five more Windows Server licences, and some SQL Server licenses. (I'm still trying to fathom why an IM server needs SQL Server behind it, when the volume could probably be happily handled by ESE, and the workload itself may well be better suited to ESE anyway. Oh, wait, there's that dull throbbing pain again. Better think about something else.)
Now, I can see some good reasons for splitting things into so many servers. But I can't see good reasons for REQUIRING it. Any technical reasons are, IMO, the result of sloppy engineering. But I don't actually see any technical reasons in 99% of cases. The only real reason for needing 7 servers where competitors can do it on 2 is that they want to sell more licenses.
Look at any backoffice solution from Microsoft, and watch the costs spiral as you suddenly and inexplicably require SQL Server and IIS boxes as separate hardware. And boggle further as every possible element somehow becomes a separate server, which then sits there at 5% utilisation for its entire lifetime.
Sure, you can re-use some of the SQL Servers or IIS servers for multiple products to save costs, but in a corporate network with DMZs for different purposes, you're still looking at a lot of servers for very little gain.
Oh, and yes, we considered virtualisation. Not supported. (I'd imagine that will change in the future, because whilst it reduces data centre bills for power and environmental control, virtualisation doesn't take any money from the licensing pool.)
Microsoft's rigid focus on getting as many licenses into the data centre as possible is directly related to why most young hip developers would rather fire up a LAMP stack. The LAMP stack is cheaper, it's more flexible, and it means you can get coding faster. Or just take time out to party.
But they offer static IPs, in both IPv4 and IPv6. They do decent monitoring of your line, and have excellent tools for reporting your bandwidth usage, uptime and so forth. They can be your domain registrar and offer DNS servers.
With the exception of the bandwidth limits, they're pretty much a geek's dream ISP - pay for good service, get good service.
Heck, you can ask their support staff questions via IRC. You can get SMS alerts when your ADSL line is down.
I have two friends that use A&A. They're very happy with them. Most other people I know are on cheap ADSL providers, Virgin Cable or work for an ISP so have a connection through their employer anyway. I don't really hear complaints from the A&A users or those getting their connection from their employer. But everyone else, myself included, has had issues and not felt the support was good.
And no, I don't work for A&A. I get my internet connection through Virgin's cable service, because I had cable already. And I'm not being paid to say this - A&A don't know me from the proverbial Adam.
But A&A are the first company I'd look at if I had to switch to ADSL. I want their service, despite the costs.
It's not about piracy, this is about service. Many A&A customers host their own webservers at home, for example... Do you want to lose your internet connection just because of a bogus complaint about a webserver only you and a few friends use?
That's probably why they're putting these protections in, more than anything else. Arse covering for their customers.;-)
Who says that the problem is the organisations running IE6?
Most of them would move off it to IE7 if they could. Really they would. It's not much more (or less) difficult than any other large application - test it, package it, drop it to machines. That's an established and controlled cycle.
The problem is not that they don't want to. The problem is that the enterprise software segment has been very shortsighted.
SAP, PeopleSoft, Seibel. ERP, Human Resources, CRM systems.
Things that organisations put in which are strategic, in a way which deserves block capitals that I'm not quite willing to put it in. But trust me, these things are signed off at board level and cost a truckload of money, so there's a management investment in getting them working at all costs - otherwise they'd have to admit that they were wrong!
And once in, they become very hard to remove. Stuff like PeopleSoft is often tied to processes like leave booking, expense claims and payroll, for example.
Upgrading these systems is not a trivial task. It's one that, even if it's a simple and smooth process, has huge risks. Risks that run towards lost days of business, inability to produce corporate accounts, or handle staffing changes and expense claims. So these systems are upgraded at a glacial pace, with the process being rigorously controlled and methodically run.
Guess which systems a company buys that would require IE6?
I'm sure that they all have versions out now that support IE7 and higher. But the companies running these systems are often one or two versions behind, and have real incentives to avoid change. Incentives that don't even factor in the client web browser's name and version.
And don't forget that these systems are not cheap. The upgrade software bill will be huge, before you even start any work. Another reason to delay, especially once management remembers how expensive and painful it was tweaking and customising these systems to match their organisation's workflows and requirements. Do that again? At huge cost? Barely two years after we last suffered through that? NO WAY!
And so this is how it starts. You can then add the fact that developers then have a standard platform of just one browser, and you soon find any in-house development is tested on just one browser. Which compounds the problem.
It started with enterprise software. It's continued by in-house developers. It has nothing to do with the merits of the client in any way.
And good luck not dealing with such organisations. This, sadly, is the state of pretty much all large organisations...
I'm not defending them, by the way. I'm just trying to help you understand why large organisations are stuck in this rut.
Off the top of my head, I'd say that the big changes would be: 1. Russia will get boisterous and attempt to take on some of its smaller satellites. 2. China will make a move for Taiwan, and might get more aggressive with Japan/Korea. 3. At some point, someone will attack Israel. 4. Um... 5. Nope, that's about it.
Number 1 has been happening on and off anyway. I just think that with no threat of U.S. intervention, Russia might throw caution to the wind and go a bit nuts on that front.
China taking Taiwan is kind of predictable, too. Japan and Korea might follow.
Israel is obvious. Someone will see a moment of what they think is weakness, and try to walk in and be an Islamic hero. I'd say that they'll have their arse handed to them on a plate, unless they're remarkably successful, in which case their arse will become a glowing cinder. No country in the world has the will to use its Nukes in self defence like Israel has... But because it's a religious thing, someone will be dumb enough to try it at some point. Sad, but true. The absence of the U.S. might just make them a little more eager about it though.
But here's the thing that most Americans don't seem to understand... NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE U.S. ANYMORE. The U.S. HAS BECOME FAR LESS RELEVANT.
If the U.S. dismantled its military, it wouldn't affect much. The only countries it would really affect are Russia, China and Israel. By extension, it will affect the ex-USSR states, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and whoever's dumb enough to attack Israel.
However, I must ask why you think the U.S. should completely dismantle its military. It's just not necessary.
The U.S. could make huge savings just by admitting that the cold war ended years ago, and that state vs state war is going to be skirmish at best - especially if they keep their ICBMs.
The U.S. has carrier fleets that they're afraid to deploy against pirates, because they know that a speedboat loaded with explosives can take out one of their destroyers.
The U.S. has hordes of tanks that take forever to deploy, require huge supply lines, and yet can be taken out from a rooftop with an RPG.
The U.S. has aircraft that are truly fantastic, amazing bits of kit - but that are hugely expensive and not much more effective than their immediate (much cheaper) competition.
The U.S. military-industrial complex is throwing money away fighting a war that ended two decades ago. What's needed now is helicopter carrier fleets - smaller, faster, more agile. More Marines and more transport and support for them. More unmanned aircraft and ground support aircraft (like the old A-10 and the AC-130).
Also badly needed is strong military field engineering, with a civilian eye. No U.S. field base should leave an area without giving every nearby village better water supplies, a prefabbed school building, and a courtesy lick of paint. Hearts and minds will secure the bases just as well, if not better, than barbed wire and watchtowers.
And the U.S. needs a "Missile Shield" to protect itself like I need a six-barrelled rotary cannon with laser sights to protect me from flies in the summer.
You could cut the U.S. military budget in half, embark on a major restructuring project, and within five years America would have a far more effective military force than it has right now.
Because right now, if the U.S. was attacked, it wouldn't be able to defend itself. That was proved on September 11th, 2001. The leader of the group that made that attack is still not captured. The senior leadership of that group is hardly dented. The group has made huge territorial gains in Pakistan because of the U.S.'s military ability to handle it. And that group is recruiting more people every day.
Dismantling the military isn't necessary. But realising that the USSR has been dead and buried for almost 20 years would be a nice first step to making it cost effective...
I think that Steam handling my patching for me is great.
If I had to reinstall Quake III from my original media, I'd then have to go out there onto the internet and find the patches.
Or I could buy it on Steam, and download the last version without hassles.
Same goes for moving machines - Steam makes this easy.
As a rule I dislike DRM. But I won't object to it on principle - some DRM can be quite acceptable because it gets the tradeoffs right, and I believe Steam is a good example of that.
Having followed Damian's CouchDB project since its inception, I'd say it's important to note that he didn't know much about TRADITIONAL databases when he started.
By traditional, he'd mean relational.
But he's trying to build a document-oriented database.
A relational database has about as much to do with a document-oriented database as American Football has to do with Football. There's a little common ground (flat green playing surface, two teams, a football) but even in that common ground we find that the definitions hide differences which make them impossibly interchangable. (Try changing a football for a football and then playing football. Doesn't matter which side you approach that sentence from, you're not going to be happy with the results...)
By building a schema that splits "documents" apart and puts them into records in many seperate tables, an RDBMS gets consistency and efficiency across the whole store. It does so at certain costs - for instance the cost of higher maintenance costs of change, as the schema must be updated and current data massaged to fit.
By building without schemas and allowing each document to contain what it likes, a document-oriented database gets consistency and flexibility for all documents. It does so at certain costs - for instance higher costs of storage and querying performance, as identical fields in documents are reproduced rather than referenced, and must be stored/queried each time.
But both approached have their benefits. The RDBMS gets faster querying and better storage efficiencies. The document-oriented database gets document integrity and the possibility of easier versioning and security functions.
Neither approach is globally right. Each has its use cases. If I had to build a database that tracked ticket sales/seat allocations in realtime for a worldwide airline, I'd pick an RDBMS. But if I wanted to build a discussion forum or a document management system, I'd be more inclined to pick the document-oriented database system.
To say "it's as rational as rolling your own encryption from scratch without the slightest clue about encryption algorithms or theories" merely shows your own ignorance of the document-oriented approach.
You might as well say that it's as rational as trying to build a boat when he has no knowledge of motorbike maintenance...
Still, your title was right. Laziness rules when it comes to people informing themselves before posting on Slashdot...;-)
When you buy a Dell, it comes with a load of software on it. That software could include Firefox if Dell wanted to ship that.
(I'm just using Dell as an example, by the way.)
Now, the outcome of the DoJ antitrust case was that Microsoft's control over the desktop that an OEM ships was reduced. Prior to the DoJ case, Microsoft could actually prevent OEMs from putting any icon they disliked onto the desktop. (Really!)
However, the DoJ case had a weak punishment. Whilst Microsoft can't tell Dell not to install Firefox, and can't stop them from putting the icon on the desktop, that's still not good enough for Dell and other OEMs.
Because the DoJ outcome still has IE bundled with Windows. So if Dell did ship Forefox, IE would still be there. That potentially confuses customers, which can increase your support costs, and makes Firefox (or any non-IE browser) more expensive.
Now, if Dell could choose to create an image that didn't have IE installed, it would change things. They could ship another browser, with potentially less support costs and less confusion for users.
(I'm not going to address the issues with web design, except to agree that many sites are crap!)
What browsers on the market charge for their product? Only Opera that I am aware of.
They haven't charged end customers for a desktop browser since 2005. Version 8.5 dropped the requirement on the desktop.
Opera do still charge for their Mobile browser - the binary platform-optimised version for mobile phones. But they don't charge for Opera Mini, which is the J2ME version of their mobile phone browser.
Basically, Opera have been moving away from charging the customer unless there's clearly a market for it. Optimising a browser for a phone is difficult and expensive, and many phone companies have done an awful job of it - hence charging for the mobile version. But that's changing, so the mobile version might either die or go free at some point in the future.
Opera are a business, so they have to make money somehow. I'm afraid that this isn't 2001, and business plans in the "... Profit!" model don't actually work.
Most of Opera's revenue doesn't come from end-users. It comes from licensing and customising their browser product for OEMs. For instance, Nintendo paid them to produce the web browser that they use for their Internet Channel on the Wii...
It sounds like Opera is blaming Microsoft for their lack of marketing and letting people know they have a choice.
Opera is complaining that Microsoft are illegally abusing their monopoly by bundling one product with another. It's the same complain Netscape made in the US, the same complaint that was upheld in the US, and the same complaint that the US failed to meaningfully punish.
In the end I don't really care because I use Linux and none of this (a?)effects me.
I'm posting this from Opera (9.6) on Linux (Ubuntu 8.04), so haven't the foggiest what your point was there...
Word count is a major difference if it means your legal documents are refused by the court.
Would you have ever considered that such a thing could happen? That your word processor swore blind you were under the 1500 word limit, but the court differed and threw it out?
But yes, perhaps my title over-eggs the pudding. And I did play down the numbers in my comment, saying that they could be as few as 95%/5% or even less.
For me, the fact remains that all the differences between competing products in a market are quite minor, until one of them costs you money or large amounts of time. Then it becomes major.
A "legal version" optimised OpenOffice.Org would have very minor differences to the outside observer, but for lawyers it could save them hundreds of dollars per day. Across a practice, that's becoming serious cash.
The ability to modify the source code could open up such niches, if someone moves quickly - selling support for a psuedo-forked legal version, or medical version, or other niche markets. I wonder if that'll happen?
WordPerfect folks get thinner on the ground every year. Corel's got the program in maintenance mode (pretty much), selling a new version each year or so with as many improvements as they can afford, but without really doing the major work that is needed for greater international acceptance.
As for why it was popular - it wasn't really evangelising as such. That played a part, but the more important thing was WordPerfect's own support.
Bear in mind that this was a market in which WordStar had been the previous dominant player. With its home-key shortcuts, which are hardly friendly. They're still to be found in many products today, so evidently some people love them - but I never got on with them, and they show that unfriendly text-based interfaces were hardly the exception.
In that kind of marketplace, the support a company gave you was important. Being able to call them and ask how to do something - and get a fast, efficient answer - was a big plus.
The other thing that WordPerfect had was a huge support library for printers. This is often overlooked, and easily so, because these days printing is done via common APIs like the Windows printing system or CUPS. An application dumps its data into the queue, and the printer drivers do the rest. (OK, OK, that oversimplifies, but you get the idea.)
WordPerfect had a huge library of printer drivers - when a new printer shipped, they went out and bought it. Then they wrote/amended a printer driver for it. And put it on their BBS so that businesses could download the new printer driver - or you could phone WordPerfect and for a nominal fee get the latest set of drivers sent to you via post.
There were other reasons too - WordPerfect was faster than most others (large chunks of it were written in Assembler), and its efficient use of memory (plus later use of EMS/XMS memory) meant that it could handle pretty large documents for its time.
But when old-time users of WordPerfect think of it, they often think of that excellent support - both in customer service and in device support.
As for running WordPerfect in order to fight the man - some of us just got used to more power, and when we tried to switch to Word we found it lacking. It's not so much a case of "fighting the man" as it is having lots of documents in a format that the "new standard" doesn't seem to handle very well, and finding that the new standard is also not able to do what you could with the old standard.
I've finally switched across to OpenOffice.Org's suite though (alogn with moving to Linux as my primary OS) - it probably has a brighter future, all things considered.
Whilst I miss WordPerfect I think I have to thank Word for lowering my expectations over several years to the point where I could make that switch....
I stopped short of saying that WordPerfect was almost a full DTP system in and of itself, even as early as version 5.x.
As far as I'm concerned, for most people's DTP needs, WordPerfect may as well have been a DTP system. It had reliable, predictable, useful page layout via text boxes years ago, and yet to this day Word still can't figure out how to reliably keep a text box in the same place on a page. Let alone rotate it, resize it and flow text around it with any kind of grace.
It's not perfect, of course, and I've hit the limits of WordPerfect when doing "weird stuff". For instance, don't try putting hyperlinks in text boxes. That's the only reproducible crash I could ever find in recent versions of WordPerfect for Windows.
But for general small-scale DTP oriented towards printing, WordPerfect is not just acceptable, but pretty hard to beat.
Sadly, when I switched to Linux as an OS, I had to leave WordPerfect behind. OpenOffice.Org's Writer is "good enough", and actually manages to mimic Word without bringing Word's glaring deficiencies and stupidity along for the ride.
The problem Microsoft has is not so much that they produce the unexceptional (Excel's quite nice!), but that the vast majority of users need nothing exceptional. If I couldn't use OpenOffice.Org's Writer, AbiWord would probably be just fine in its place. Heck, many text editors would be fine for most of my output, as I'm not a font-whoring bold-abusing italic-obsessed loon...
So far I've not needed to do any DTP - but like yourself, Scribus is pencilled in for that...
1. Word handles word count differently to WordPerfect. WordPerfect counts all words, even those in footnotes. Word didn't for a long time (I think they might have fixed that now). Word was unwelcome as a format in many legal courts in the US, because some types of filing have word count limits and users or Word consistently over-ran, thus filing documents that the court could not accept.
2. Word has a paragraph-based formatting engine, which is very different to the stream based one in WordPerfect. That's a huge difference - it's like saying that Word is a bitmap painting package, and WordPerfect is a vector one.
Those are two differences off the top of my head. I'd say that switching from WordPerfect to Word could well require training, especially if these kinds of differences were ones you used a lot in your work.
Here's one practical example I found many years ago: Word has no concept of right-justification within a line unless you use tabs. WordPerfect does. If you right-justify in WordPerfect and then change your margins, paper size or paper orientation then WordPerfect just handles it for you - the text snaps to the new margin with no effort required on your part. When I had to use Word, I had to learn the tab-based workaround. And I had to change the formatting of some kinds of documents I produced, as switching from portrait to landscape meant much more extra work as I then had to change all the tab stops on those pages too. (I eventually solved this by creating styles with the tab stops in them, one for each page orientation. But that solution took time to arrive at.)
Whether your word processor is Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org's Writer, AbiWord, or something else - any heavy use will likely expose you to some feature that either has no direct analogue in other products, or that works differently in them.
If all you ever do is write one-page letters with no real formatting beyond basic text appearance, right-justifying paragraphs and indenting text, then what I've written means nothing to you. You're in the 80% of people who use only 20% of the features. (Possibly even 90%/10% these days.)
For the other 20%, switching word processors will always mean retraining to some degree, as they find these differences by trail and error.
"Reading comprehension problems"? Well, the best way to get someone understanding your point is of course to insult them. Preferably anonymously, as that way you definitely have the moral high ground.
That aside, yes, ActiveSync is a bonus for Apple when integrating. IBM should have something like ActiveSync - and should have had it some time ago.
However, there's a flip side: Domino is an application platform.
Getting data out of an NSF on a Domino server via HTTP is trivial - IBM could probably create the necessary views and agents to provide data for synchronising within a matter of days. The only part missing once that's done is the new message notification, which would likely require an amendment to the HTTP server itself - a point release of the Domino Server would fix that.
This isn't a technologically difficult issue. ActiveSync or no ActiveSync, the simple fact is that Apple never even approached IBM when considering the enterprise - despite the fact that IBM's Domino/Notes is estimated to have around 48% of enterprise messaging seats.
The lack of an equivalent technology to ActiveSync may have influenced that - but what exactly was stopping Apple from even asking? We've been told that they didn't. I find it difficult to believe that was just because there was no ActiveSync - Apple didn't even phone IBM to ask them if they could provide such a thing.
If Apple wanted integration with Domino/Notes, I think they could have had it. IBM would like it, but Apple's SDK doesn't allow it, so their hands are tied.
I'd like IBM to have an ActiveSync equivalent. As I've described, it needn't be that difficult for them.
But I don't see that it would have helped here - Apple made their decision, and that's that.
What I read was lots of iPhone fanboys screaming that there was no enterprise sync with Domino/Notes, and that this would single-handedly kill the product as Corporate America spent the next month doing nothing but throwing out all phones for iPhones, and all mail systems for Exchange. (That's why I call them fanboys - their reasoned analysis and reaction identifies them as such to me.)
IBM's response was (and had to be) "Apple didn't approach us about it, and we can't do it on our own as the SDK as shipped doesn't have the appropriate APIs exposed". Basically, Apple chose to work with Microsoft only when it came to synching with Enterprise systems, and IBM has little control over that.
Now, IBM had _already_ been developing the iNotes Lite system that the NY Times article refers to.
The full iNotes webmail system is pretty good, but it's also a pretty complicated web application which only ran on a couple of supported browsing platforms - all desktop. (For example, until recently, it was actually IE only, with ActiveX components.)
To give people access to the basics no matter what the (modern) browser someone was using, iNotes Lite was developed. (The betas have been shown to work on the Opera browser of a Nintendo Wii, amongst other things.)
So this wasn't even really developed specifically for the iPhone. It's just the first thing that IBM have shipped which can work on an iPhone.
IBM may or may not be working with Apple to get more native integration working on the iPhone. But given how open and public Apple are, we likely wouldn't know until it ships.
But let's be clear - the real blocker is the lack of support from Apple. This isn't specific to IBM - my understanding is that if you wanted to write something that used SyncML to synchronise an iPhone and a Funambol server, you couldn't do it either. The SDK has no documented ways of doing access to the mail/calender/to-do application storage that would allow integration, so unless you can work with Apple directly you're stuck.
What's really interesting is that IBM's marketing is now spinning it as "The iPhone wasn't secure, this is".
That could be IBM giving up on Apple and just going with what they've got. Or it could be IBM toning their public reaction down from "Apple are crap and don't want to work with us" because they are working with Apple now.
Only time will tell.
I feel pretty sorry for IBM on this whole affair. The sheer hype around the iPhone makes this somehow a major story, when in the grand scheme of things - even within the computing world - it's actually rather a non-event...
The PowerPC's desktop presence was pretty much killed when Apple switched.
I don't think IBM makes an workstations that use the PPC chips anymore - but they still use the related POWER architecture in their higher end servers.
So on the desktop, it's dead.
In the device and embedded market, however, it's quite popular. It has an unusual niche "above" ARM and "below" x86, so to speak.
This is because it has higher performance capabilities and better integration with commodity computing hardware than most ARM chips can provide, whilst having lower power requirements and higher per-watt performance than X86 chips.
This article from IBM's developerWorks has two sections in which PPC is compared with X86 and ARM: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/pa-migrate/ It's not as biased as its IBM provenance might make you think, and provides a nice summary of the differences in real world usage.
As for where PPC is being used - well, you probably own a device with a PPC chip in it, and just don't know it. They're used in vehicle management systems by Ford, they're in a wide variety of laser printers, they're used in some network/NAS devices.
Oh, and they're also used in all the current generation consoles, of course - so maybe you do own a PPC processor and knew it after all!;-)
What does that even mean? How is "searching the view contents" different than "searching the document displayed in the view?"
It means I'm not a trainer, and can't communicate ideas within my technical domain to those outside it without some occasional difficulties.
You have my apologies for that - I didn't mean to confuse!
What does it mean technically? Open up Gmail in Firefox, whilst you have the Find bar open. If you use the Find bar, you'll only search the text on that page (the view contents). If you go to the page's Search input area, it'll do a search of all the content in the current folder/view (for example the currently selected tag in Gmail, or the current folder in Notes.)
That's what it means. The difference between searching the summary data displayed, and the actual documents that those summaries would open.
Can you actually provide a specific example of why I would ever want to do that? I can't think of any problem that solves.
Notes has a huge heritage for supporting people that travel a lot. As such, a lot of the Locations system is designed to allow easy switching of servers and other configuration items.
One example of where you'd want to switch rendering paths would be when you're offline. One of the options (Notes with Internet Explorer, IIRC) allows for remote HTML elements to be cached locally for re-use. Yes, IE does that. But IE didn't introduce decent offline working until after Notes did, and this is effectively what Notes is offering.
So, when you're in a hotel room and want to read mails offline without a loss of content, you'd want this.
Of course, if your job is one where you're either deskbound or don't travel long distances/multiple nights with a laptop, then the feature is far less useful.
Executives travel a lot. Salespeople travel a lot. And Notes is almost 20 years old, so it has a large heritage of features, many of which were there to solve problems long before the underlying operating systems or other products tried their hands at solving them.
I don't use it.
Yet you evidently feel qualified enough to comment on it at every opportunity.;p
Slashdotters vastly over-estimate the time it takes to re-train users
Time to re-train, time to support the re-training, time to roll out the product you're re-training on to thousands of desktops, time to find replacements to solutions that integrated into the product and integrate them into the new product...
Time is money.
Go to the CIO of a large company, and tell him you'd like to rip and replace the existing, working email system with another existing, working email system. Tell him it'll only cost a few million, maybe tens of millions at most. Tell him that doesn't include loss of productivity in staff as they adjust to the new system.
Guess what happens?
The fact is that migrations to/from mail systems have really slowed down of late. CIOs are becoming far better educated in the costs and the returns, and choosing not to migrate mail systems where possible. The only exceptions are mergers and acquisitions, where it's perhaps necessary.
The training costs may well be over-estimated, but if it were just training costs then entire chunks of my career would have consisted of me twiddling my thumbs doing nothing, rather than working 18 hour days over weekends to get things done.
If migrations were easy, then consultancies would be MUCH poorer...
On the other hand, maybe changing a password in a text/hash-storage based system (password files on unix, an entry in an LDAP database, the hash in AD) is trivial compared to changing the password in a secure public/private key system (Notes, GPG, X.509).
In which case, you'd be seeing the trees but not the forest.
Which was perhaps my point, albeit evidently badly made.
You usually wait until you've been proved wrong at least three times before that starts...
Yes, I know that Microsoft uses Exchange. That's one of its biggest problems, actually - all of their internal dogfooding and testing tends to assume the money-rich environment that Microsoft has.
That's why customers using the initial AD implementation found that large group updates swamped their lower-speed WAN links - Microsoft had evidently never tested it on a lower speed WAN link! (It passed the WHOLE updated group across, not just the changes. A rather nasty surprise, especially if you reorganised an office and did many group updates. Which one large bank did, and caused some embarrassment.)
The history of Exchange Server is pretty much written in that story - Microsoft assumes you will use it as they do, in a "resource surplus rich" environment.
That's why up until Exchange 2000, Exchange required 128Kbits/s of dedicated bandwidth for it between sites and recommended 256Kbits/s, when many companies had no more than 64Kbits/s for all applications. (Do you think that requirement went down or up with Exchange 2000? Actually, it stayed the same. But half the bandwidth had been shipped off to Active Directory, so in real terms it went up.)
Meanwhile, the minimum for Domino was "grab a modem, and see how it goes".
Microsoft can afford expensive log-shipping solutions for off-site clustering. Look at the Microsoft clustering solution, and ask yourself whether or not it was designed well? It's improved, but it's basically hardware-heavy and - for most products except SQL Server - has single points of failure in hardware.
Given how many Microsoft Cluster Services servers I've seen fail to failover, and how many man-hours I've seen spent tinkering with clusters to get them working, I'd say it was basically a very expensive failure as designs go. But it's the only option on the Windows platform, so "Microsoft uses it" is the glowing recommendation it gets.
I'm sorry, but "Microsoft uses Exchange" doesn't impress me. And 80,000 users on one cluster sounds like a highly suspect figure. In one Exchange environment, yes. But on one cluster? Someone's misheard, or is smoking something.
Or maybe all of those users are the Exchange admins they fired when they shipped 2003, and made it much more manageable. Yeah, that would be it - dormant accounts!
Come on, Blakey. You can do better than this, and we both know it...
"not work in version a, fixed in b, and broken again in c": In the Notes client itself, or in an application that runs in Notes? IBM does get a few regressions with each patch. (They're usually introduced when code is backported from a later version of Notes - e.g. the problem is fixed in 8, so they port the fix back to 7, but find that also brings back a bug that 7 needed a specific patch for.)
They have the massive task of shipping 3 updates per year for two concurrent versions across 6 server-side platforms and up to 3 client platforms, so it's regrettable but kind of inevitable.
If you could get an example SPR, it would be helpful - there may have been a workaround.
I'm afraid that's all I can say on that issue, so on to the next.
"Attachments from our ERP system's notification email process corrupt at random intervals on random individuals": Now that is odd. From what you've said, I presume you mean documents launched from within Notes, and I can't say I've seen that. Has it been reported to IBM?
"We can't even use the SMTP gateway for our BI platform, since our Domino server doesn't like PDFs sent in via SMTP": I've never heard of that. Can you send PDFs from other sources? It could be that the BI platform isn't encoding them correctly. If you can receive PDFs from other mail sources without the same problems, then the problem isn't with Domino/Notes. Test that rigorously, and then call IBM support if you do find it's Domino/Notes.
"It generates errors if we use a dummy return address": Finally, something I can give you decent pointers on! Your Domino server just has some basic anti-spam configurations enabled, and they're conflicting with the ERP mails being sent. Either create a real dummy address (using a mail-in database so that the SMTP address is valid, and then adding it to the allowed senders list) or modify your configuration. Your Notes admin should be able to handle that eaily.
Sorry I couldn't help, but I did the best I could with the information given. If you can get more information, feel free to reply and I'll see what else I can do.:-)
They've already documented the C API (for locally using the Notes DLLs to access Notes data/databases), provided a number of decent open protocol implementations (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, HTTP, SOAP, WebDAV, DIIOP), and they don't lock/hide the design of the templates that they ship with Notes.
I'm not sure what more they could do...;-)
Actually, I am sure. I think that the Notes APIs are Windows only, so making them available on Linux/Mac might be nice. Otherwise, though, just pushing to polish the HTTP server and get even more interoperability that way might be useful...
Versioning in Word isn't really appropriate. We're not talking about just having the text - we're talking about having a single point of reference (the application in Notes) that shows you the latest version and a history of changes.
If I send you a link to a document in such an application, then this is easy.
If I send you a Word document that's got loads of versions in it, how do you know it's the latest version? If you have many such emails, will it be easier or harder to find the latest usable draft?
Word's versioning is really geared towards collaborative editing within word. It does things like comparing documents. It's not an authoritative central versioning system though.
The versioning in Notes (and in any document management system, such as Documentum, DB2 Document Manager, etc.) is geared towards an accurate, authoritative revision history. As such, the versioning is often used in Notes applications alongside review workflow and document locking, to help make sure that the latest document version actually is.
WP did have versioning, but as a local add-in per machine - kind of like CVS really. The file format itself, IIRC, does not support versioning.
Then again, I'm not sure that the PowerPoint file format supports versioning (and I'm not about to go and check to be honest), so the advantage of a Notes application or a DMS would be that you can extend versioning to any file type provided you store it in the application - rather than just in Word or Excel.
Office also can't do cataloguing (unless you count "Windows Explorer shows me a list" as cataloguing), and its search indexing is more reliant on the Windows search engine than anything else. Useful if all your documents are local, less useful in other uses.
Again, for contrast, WordPerfect Office has its own per-machine index (via its QuickFind Indexer, if I recall correctly) but no cataloguing.
Based on previous experience, I'd imagine that most law firms will probably be using a document management system, and its ODMA plugin on the desktop for integration with Word/WordPerfect. Which means that all client-side features we've discussed here wouldn't be used.
Slashdot Mirror
Please define "cannot sustain itself". The only evidence you provided is residence owenrship rates, which is not a valid comparison within the topic of debate.
Property markets vary worldwide, not just due to demand or supply, but also due to the local legal frameworks. North Continental Europe tends (as a generalisation across its many countries) to give a fair amount of rights to those renting. Redecorating, for example, is a right that my Continental neighbours have which as a UK resident I don't have as easily. If a UK renter wants to redecorate, they usually have to seek their landlord's approval - but if they were living in France, they wouldn't.
With greater rights and protection for tenants, many people in Germany and its neighbours probably never feel as great a need to own property. It's a simple trade-off - you own it, you get benefits like equity, but have to deal with all problems with the property. Don't own it, and you never get equity but your landlord has responsibilities.
Now, in the UK, we have more restrictions as renters so ownership is more attractive. But in Germany or France, my understanding is that the better protection of tenants means that ownership is less attractive. Not unattractive - just not as attractive as in other territories.
So residence ownership isn't a good statistic to compare, as it has reasons beyond city design or population sustainability.
Although to be clear, I don't understand what either residence ownership or population sustainability have to do with the conversation here either. It seems like you're just clutching at straws to justify the American city design of Suburban Sprawl, rather than attempting to understand how other countries that are more land-constrained have dealt with the issue of city growth and the transport requirements it brings...
(See? We got back on topic!)
Nonsense. Oil already hit $120 a few years back, and I don't know anyone who had to chose between commuting and traveling. Even if it hits $200 per barrel 5 years from now, my car will be ready for replacement, and I can buy another one which uses half as much fuel.
Just so I'm clear on this... Your solution to "Fuel is getting more expensive, at some point I may not be able to commute" will be "I need to buy a new car".
Hmmm.
I think I'm beginning to see why America has such a large deficit...
I think you'll find it's giving significant advantage.
To the bank accounts of Intel and AMD, as it's giving people (often gamers) a "reason to upgrade"... ;-)
Generally, though, I'd agree with you.
When I last bought a machine, it was before the time of Windows 7. 64-bit was an option, but not a good one. So I went with 32-bit and 4Gb of RAM, mostly because of reasons I suspect you'd agree with:
a) For playing games under Windows, I lose nothing. A 768Mb graphics card means I lose 768Mb of RAM under Windows, but the game itself can only use 2Gb and that still leaves 1.3Gb for the OS to play in for disk cache. What's the problem?
b) For doing anything productive I use Linux, where PAE allows all 4Gb to be used with no RAM loss, and no noticable performance hit.
c) 64-bit Windows XP was utter crud, mostly because of driver issues.
64-bit is inevitable, but I wonder how many people will actually use it that much. People editing video at home stand more chance than the average gamer of using >4Gb. Try telling that to a gamer, though. ;-)
I like my physical media.
For music, and movies, and so forth, anyway. It gives me freedom, to some degree. For instance, my collection of CDs is reasonable (500+), and some of them haven't been MP3'd yet. But worse, some were MP3'd years ago, at a low bit rate because when your player only has 64Mb of storage (yes, MEGAbytes - a Diamond Rio 500 - look it up!) you have to compromise a little.
I'm now slowly going through them and re-ripping at a much higher bitrate. In that scenario, having media wins.
However, I'm racking my brains trying to think why I'd want the media for games.
I had the media for games a while ago, and it was a PITA. I then bought the iD Complete Pack on Steam - every iD game up to that point. I still had my media for old iD games like Quake III and Quake III Arena, but installing via Steam was much easier. No mucking about with CDs, no hunting through packaging trying to find what the serial number's written on... And no having to find and download the patches, then install them - sometimes in a specific order.
With Steam and no physical media, I just download, copy the serial number, and go!
It's not like a re-install from original media would allow higher quality. Just more hassle.
I did once have an attachment to the original media for my games. Not any more. Not since I had to rebuild a machine and had to go off finding patches, hunt for lost manuals with serial numbers in them, and deal with scratched media. When I had a brand new machine later on, I just shuddered at the thought of the pain and time the physical media route would take. Then I saw the Complete Pack on Steam, and got my wallet out.
I can still just about see a point to having the media for music and video materials. But that's partly because backing up virtual only media (especially video) can take terabytes once you've got a reasonable collection. And partly because I'm loathe to do any encoding at anything but a very high quality level, as I've learnt my lesson!
I suspect that by the time I'm halfway through re-encoding my CDs, I'll be contemplating whether it's not just better to go looking at how much they'd cost to buy from Amazon or wherever... It may not stop me from re-encoding, but it might convince me it's not worth buying the physical media for my new music purchases any more...
Sad but true. It'll be the end of an era.
One final sad thought on the end of eras... I remember when albums had two sides. But right now it looks like I will have to explain to my children (well, my mates' children) that we once bought songs in bundles called Albums, on which the artists had sometimes painstakingly arranged songs into a specific order, for a certain effect. And that part of the pleasure of listening was to play the album, in order, to get that effect.
Ye gods, I feel old now.
"...Windows loses on the same box..."
Well, it loses because you can't run a Microsoft solution on one box and be supported in 'production environments'.
With a FOSS solution, support isn't a huge issue. Because of that, what support you can get is often more flexible. So if you're throwing together a DEV or UAT environment, it's often an all-in-one box. Webserver, database, app daemons - everything on one box.
And you can deploy live that too, in your Production environment. You only need to break it apart into multiple boxes when you hit any kind of performance/scaling issue.
But the Microsoft Way is that all these things must be separate machines. And that ends up costing a lot of money, taking up a lot more time (because there are more machines to deal with), and generally being cumbersome.
Microsoft doesn't care that other solutions require less machines. They sell licenses. Not software - licenses. So to them, having a solution which requires three or four machines is actually a plus - more Windows licenses!
Case in point - I was recently involved in rolling out Office Communications Server (OCS), which does instant messaging/voice/video chat.
We already have another system which also does IM/chat/voice. It requires two servers, and even then it only requires two because we want high availability - if one server/site dies, the other takes over.
Microsoft's OCS, to do the same job, requires three servers. Multiply by two to get high availability, and then add in an odd little beastie of a server which "monitors quality of service", and we have a total of... Seven servers.
(The monitoring server can't be highly available, you see. No, don't ask. The answer will just make that dull throbbing pain in your skull worse...)
Two servers vs seven servers.
Microsoft's solution is not obviously better than the two server solution. They both have strengths and weaknesses. Overall, for our requirements, they're on a par with each other.
But in terms of cost, Microsoft's solution requires five more Windows Server licences, and some SQL Server licenses.
(I'm still trying to fathom why an IM server needs SQL Server behind it, when the volume could probably be happily handled by ESE, and the workload itself may well be better suited to ESE anyway. Oh, wait, there's that dull throbbing pain again. Better think about something else.)
Now, I can see some good reasons for splitting things into so many servers. But I can't see good reasons for REQUIRING it. Any technical reasons are, IMO, the result of sloppy engineering. But I don't actually see any technical reasons in 99% of cases. The only real reason for needing 7 servers where competitors can do it on 2 is that they want to sell more licenses.
Look at any backoffice solution from Microsoft, and watch the costs spiral as you suddenly and inexplicably require SQL Server and IIS boxes as separate hardware. And boggle further as every possible element somehow becomes a separate server, which then sits there at 5% utilisation for its entire lifetime.
Sure, you can re-use some of the SQL Servers or IIS servers for multiple products to save costs, but in a corporate network with DMZs for different purposes, you're still looking at a lot of servers for very little gain.
Oh, and yes, we considered virtualisation. Not supported. (I'd imagine that will change in the future, because whilst it reduces data centre bills for power and environmental control, virtualisation doesn't take any money from the licensing pool.)
Microsoft's rigid focus on getting as many licenses into the data centre as possible is directly related to why most young hip developers would rather fire up a LAMP stack. The LAMP stack is cheaper, it's more flexible, and it means you can get coding faster.
Or just take time out to party.
Either way, you can see why it's more attractive.
Yep, they're not cheap.
But they offer static IPs, in both IPv4 and IPv6. They do decent monitoring of your line, and have excellent tools for reporting your bandwidth usage, uptime and so forth. They can be your domain registrar and offer DNS servers.
With the exception of the bandwidth limits, they're pretty much a geek's dream ISP - pay for good service, get good service.
Heck, you can ask their support staff questions via IRC. You can get SMS alerts when your ADSL line is down.
I have two friends that use A&A. They're very happy with them. Most other people I know are on cheap ADSL providers, Virgin Cable or work for an ISP so have a connection through their employer anyway. I don't really hear complaints from the A&A users or those getting their connection from their employer. But everyone else, myself included, has had issues and not felt the support was good.
And no, I don't work for A&A. I get my internet connection through Virgin's cable service, because I had cable already. And I'm not being paid to say this - A&A don't know me from the proverbial Adam.
But A&A are the first company I'd look at if I had to switch to ADSL. I want their service, despite the costs.
It's not about piracy, this is about service. Many A&A customers host their own webservers at home, for example... Do you want to lose your internet connection just because of a bogus complaint about a webserver only you and a few friends use?
That's probably why they're putting these protections in, more than anything else. Arse covering for their customers. ;-)
Who says that the problem is the organisations running IE6?
Most of them would move off it to IE7 if they could. Really they would. It's not much more (or less) difficult than any other large application - test it, package it, drop it to machines. That's an established and controlled cycle.
The problem is not that they don't want to. The problem is that the enterprise software segment has been very shortsighted.
SAP, PeopleSoft, Seibel. ERP, Human Resources, CRM systems.
Things that organisations put in which are strategic, in a way which deserves block capitals that I'm not quite willing to put it in. But trust me, these things are signed off at board level and cost a truckload of money, so there's a management investment in getting them working at all costs - otherwise they'd have to admit that they were wrong!
And once in, they become very hard to remove. Stuff like PeopleSoft is often tied to processes like leave booking, expense claims and payroll, for example.
Upgrading these systems is not a trivial task. It's one that, even if it's a simple and smooth process, has huge risks. Risks that run towards lost days of business, inability to produce corporate accounts, or handle staffing changes and expense claims. So these systems are upgraded at a glacial pace, with the process being rigorously controlled and methodically run.
Guess which systems a company buys that would require IE6?
I'm sure that they all have versions out now that support IE7 and higher. But the companies running these systems are often one or two versions behind, and have real incentives to avoid change. Incentives that don't even factor in the client web browser's name and version.
And don't forget that these systems are not cheap. The upgrade software bill will be huge, before you even start any work. Another reason to delay, especially once management remembers how expensive and painful it was tweaking and customising these systems to match their organisation's workflows and requirements. Do that again? At huge cost? Barely two years after we last suffered through that? NO WAY!
And so this is how it starts. You can then add the fact that developers then have a standard platform of just one browser, and you soon find any in-house development is tested on just one browser. Which compounds the problem.
It started with enterprise software. It's continued by in-house developers. It has nothing to do with the merits of the client in any way.
And good luck not dealing with such organisations. This, sadly, is the state of pretty much all large organisations...
I'm not defending them, by the way. I'm just trying to help you understand why large organisations are stuck in this rut.
Off the top of my head, I'd say that the big changes would be:
1. Russia will get boisterous and attempt to take on some of its smaller satellites.
2. China will make a move for Taiwan, and might get more aggressive with Japan/Korea.
3. At some point, someone will attack Israel.
4. Um...
5. Nope, that's about it.
Number 1 has been happening on and off anyway. I just think that with no threat of U.S. intervention, Russia might throw caution to the wind and go a bit nuts on that front.
China taking Taiwan is kind of predictable, too. Japan and Korea might follow.
Israel is obvious. Someone will see a moment of what they think is weakness, and try to walk in and be an Islamic hero. I'd say that they'll have their arse handed to them on a plate, unless they're remarkably successful, in which case their arse will become a glowing cinder. No country in the world has the will to use its Nukes in self defence like Israel has...
But because it's a religious thing, someone will be dumb enough to try it at some point. Sad, but true.
The absence of the U.S. might just make them a little more eager about it though.
But here's the thing that most Americans don't seem to understand...
NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE U.S. ANYMORE. The U.S. HAS BECOME FAR LESS RELEVANT.
If the U.S. dismantled its military, it wouldn't affect much. The only countries it would really affect are Russia, China and Israel. By extension, it will affect the ex-USSR states, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and whoever's dumb enough to attack Israel.
However, I must ask why you think the U.S. should completely dismantle its military. It's just not necessary.
The U.S. could make huge savings just by admitting that the cold war ended years ago, and that state vs state war is going to be skirmish at best - especially if they keep their ICBMs.
The U.S. has carrier fleets that they're afraid to deploy against pirates, because they know that a speedboat loaded with explosives can take out one of their destroyers.
The U.S. has hordes of tanks that take forever to deploy, require huge supply lines, and yet can be taken out from a rooftop with an RPG.
The U.S. has aircraft that are truly fantastic, amazing bits of kit - but that are hugely expensive and not much more effective than their immediate (much cheaper) competition.
The U.S. military-industrial complex is throwing money away fighting a war that ended two decades ago. What's needed now is helicopter carrier fleets - smaller, faster, more agile. More Marines and more transport and support for them.
More unmanned aircraft and ground support aircraft (like the old A-10 and the AC-130).
Also badly needed is strong military field engineering, with a civilian eye. No U.S. field base should leave an area without giving every nearby village better water supplies, a prefabbed school building, and a courtesy lick of paint. Hearts and minds will secure the bases just as well, if not better, than barbed wire and watchtowers.
And the U.S. needs a "Missile Shield" to protect itself like I need a six-barrelled rotary cannon with laser sights to protect me from flies in the summer.
You could cut the U.S. military budget in half, embark on a major restructuring project, and within five years America would have a far more effective military force than it has right now.
Because right now, if the U.S. was attacked, it wouldn't be able to defend itself. That was proved on September 11th, 2001. The leader of the group that made that attack is still not captured. The senior leadership of that group is hardly dented. The group has made huge territorial gains in Pakistan because of the U.S.'s military ability to handle it. And that group is recruiting more people every day.
Dismantling the military isn't necessary. But realising that the USSR has been dead and buried for almost 20 years would be a nice first step to making it cost effective...
I'd second this, and go further.
Patching.
I think that Steam handling my patching for me is great.
If I had to reinstall Quake III from my original media, I'd then have to go out there onto the internet and find the patches.
Or I could buy it on Steam, and download the last version without hassles.
Same goes for moving machines - Steam makes this easy.
As a rule I dislike DRM. But I won't object to it on principle - some DRM can be quite acceptable because it gets the tradeoffs right, and I believe Steam is a good example of that.
Having followed Damian's CouchDB project since its inception, I'd say it's important to note that he didn't know much about TRADITIONAL databases when he started.
By traditional, he'd mean relational.
But he's trying to build a document-oriented database.
A relational database has about as much to do with a document-oriented database as American Football has to do with Football. There's a little common ground (flat green playing surface, two teams, a football) but even in that common ground we find that the definitions hide differences which make them impossibly interchangable. (Try changing a football for a football and then playing football. Doesn't matter which side you approach that sentence from, you're not going to be happy with the results...)
By building a schema that splits "documents" apart and puts them into records in many seperate tables, an RDBMS gets consistency and efficiency across the whole store. It does so at certain costs - for instance the cost of higher maintenance costs of change, as the schema must be updated and current data massaged to fit.
By building without schemas and allowing each document to contain what it likes, a document-oriented database gets consistency and flexibility for all documents. It does so at certain costs - for instance higher costs of storage and querying performance, as identical fields in documents are reproduced rather than referenced, and must be stored/queried each time.
But both approached have their benefits. The RDBMS gets faster querying and better storage efficiencies. The document-oriented database gets document integrity and the possibility of easier versioning and security functions.
Neither approach is globally right. Each has its use cases. If I had to build a database that tracked ticket sales/seat allocations in realtime for a worldwide airline, I'd pick an RDBMS.
But if I wanted to build a discussion forum or a document management system, I'd be more inclined to pick the document-oriented database system.
To say "it's as rational as rolling your own encryption from scratch without the slightest clue about encryption algorithms or theories" merely shows your own ignorance of the document-oriented approach.
You might as well say that it's as rational as trying to build a boat when he has no knowledge of motorbike maintenance...
Still, your title was right. Laziness rules when it comes to people informing themselves before posting on Slashdot... ;-)
Most people don't buy Windows.
They buy computers with Windows on them.
When you buy a Dell, it comes with a load of software on it. That software could include Firefox if Dell wanted to ship that.
(I'm just using Dell as an example, by the way.)
Now, the outcome of the DoJ antitrust case was that Microsoft's control over the desktop that an OEM ships was reduced. Prior to the DoJ case, Microsoft could actually prevent OEMs from putting any icon they disliked onto the desktop. (Really!)
However, the DoJ case had a weak punishment. Whilst Microsoft can't tell Dell not to install Firefox, and can't stop them from putting the icon on the desktop, that's still not good enough for Dell and other OEMs.
Because the DoJ outcome still has IE bundled with Windows. So if Dell did ship Forefox, IE would still be there. That potentially confuses customers, which can increase your support costs, and makes Firefox (or any non-IE browser) more expensive.
Now, if Dell could choose to create an image that didn't have IE installed, it would change things. They could ship another browser, with potentially less support costs and less confusion for users.
(I'm not going to address the issues with web design, except to agree that many sites are crap!)
What browsers on the market charge for their product? Only Opera that I am aware of.
They haven't charged end customers for a desktop browser since 2005. Version 8.5 dropped the requirement on the desktop.
Opera do still charge for their Mobile browser - the binary platform-optimised version for mobile phones. But they don't charge for Opera Mini, which is the J2ME version of their mobile phone browser.
Basically, Opera have been moving away from charging the customer unless there's clearly a market for it. Optimising a browser for a phone is difficult and expensive, and many phone companies have done an awful job of it - hence charging for the mobile version. But that's changing, so the mobile version might either die or go free at some point in the future.
Opera are a business, so they have to make money somehow. I'm afraid that this isn't 2001, and business plans in the "... Profit!" model don't actually work.
Most of Opera's revenue doesn't come from end-users. It comes from licensing and customising their browser product for OEMs. For instance, Nintendo paid them to produce the web browser that they use for their Internet Channel on the Wii...
It sounds like Opera is blaming Microsoft for their lack of marketing and letting people know they have a choice.
Opera is complaining that Microsoft are illegally abusing their monopoly by bundling one product with another. It's the same complain Netscape made in the US, the same complaint that was upheld in the US, and the same complaint that the US failed to meaningfully punish.
In the end I don't really care because I use Linux and none of this (a?)effects me.
I'm posting this from Opera (9.6) on Linux (Ubuntu 8.04), so haven't the foggiest what your point was there...
Word count is a major difference if it means your legal documents are refused by the court.
Would you have ever considered that such a thing could happen? That your word processor swore blind you were under the 1500 word limit, but the court differed and threw it out?
But yes, perhaps my title over-eggs the pudding. And I did play down the numbers in my comment, saying that they could be as few as 95%/5% or even less.
For me, the fact remains that all the differences between competing products in a market are quite minor, until one of them costs you money or large amounts of time.
Then it becomes major.
A "legal version" optimised OpenOffice.Org would have very minor differences to the outside observer, but for lawyers it could save them hundreds of dollars per day. Across a practice, that's becoming serious cash.
The ability to modify the source code could open up such niches, if someone moves quickly - selling support for a psuedo-forked legal version, or medical version, or other niche markets. I wonder if that'll happen?
WordPerfect folks get thinner on the ground every year. Corel's got the program in maintenance mode (pretty much), selling a new version each year or so with as many improvements as they can afford, but without really doing the major work that is needed for greater international acceptance.
As for why it was popular - it wasn't really evangelising as such. That played a part, but the more important thing was WordPerfect's own support.
Bear in mind that this was a market in which WordStar had been the previous dominant player. With its home-key shortcuts, which are hardly friendly. They're still to be found in many products today, so evidently some people love them - but I never got on with them, and they show that unfriendly text-based interfaces were hardly the exception.
In that kind of marketplace, the support a company gave you was important. Being able to call them and ask how to do something - and get a fast, efficient answer - was a big plus.
The other thing that WordPerfect had was a huge support library for printers. This is often overlooked, and easily so, because these days printing is done via common APIs like the Windows printing system or CUPS. An application dumps its data into the queue, and the printer drivers do the rest.
(OK, OK, that oversimplifies, but you get the idea.)
WordPerfect had a huge library of printer drivers - when a new printer shipped, they went out and bought it. Then they wrote/amended a printer driver for it. And put it on their BBS so that businesses could download the new printer driver - or you could phone WordPerfect and for a nominal fee get the latest set of drivers sent to you via post.
There were other reasons too - WordPerfect was faster than most others (large chunks of it were written in Assembler), and its efficient use of memory (plus later use of EMS/XMS memory) meant that it could handle pretty large documents for its time.
But when old-time users of WordPerfect think of it, they often think of that excellent support - both in customer service and in device support.
As for running WordPerfect in order to fight the man - some of us just got used to more power, and when we tried to switch to Word we found it lacking.
It's not so much a case of "fighting the man" as it is having lots of documents in a format that the "new standard" doesn't seem to handle very well, and finding that the new standard is also not able to do what you could with the old standard.
I've finally switched across to OpenOffice.Org's suite though (alogn with moving to Linux as my primary OS) - it probably has a brighter future, all things considered.
Whilst I miss WordPerfect I think I have to thank Word for lowering my expectations over several years to the point where I could make that switch....
I stopped short of saying that WordPerfect was almost a full DTP system in and of itself, even as early as version 5.x.
As far as I'm concerned, for most people's DTP needs, WordPerfect may as well have been a DTP system. It had reliable, predictable, useful page layout via text boxes years ago, and yet to this day Word still can't figure out how to reliably keep a text box in the same place on a page. Let alone rotate it, resize it and flow text around it with any kind of grace.
It's not perfect, of course, and I've hit the limits of WordPerfect when doing "weird stuff". For instance, don't try putting hyperlinks in text boxes. That's the only reproducible crash I could ever find in recent versions of WordPerfect for Windows.
But for general small-scale DTP oriented towards printing, WordPerfect is not just acceptable, but pretty hard to beat.
Sadly, when I switched to Linux as an OS, I had to leave WordPerfect behind. OpenOffice.Org's Writer is "good enough", and actually manages to mimic Word without bringing Word's glaring deficiencies and stupidity along for the ride.
The problem Microsoft has is not so much that they produce the unexceptional (Excel's quite nice!), but that the vast majority of users need nothing exceptional. If I couldn't use OpenOffice.Org's Writer, AbiWord would probably be just fine in its place. Heck, many text editors would be fine for most of my output, as I'm not a font-whoring bold-abusing italic-obsessed loon...
So far I've not needed to do any DTP - but like yourself, Scribus is pencilled in for that...
Some differences between Word and WordPerfect:
1. Word handles word count differently to WordPerfect. WordPerfect counts all words, even those in footnotes. Word didn't for a long time (I think they might have fixed that now).
Word was unwelcome as a format in many legal courts in the US, because some types of filing have word count limits and users or Word consistently over-ran, thus filing documents that the court could not accept.
2. Word has a paragraph-based formatting engine, which is very different to the stream based one in WordPerfect. That's a huge difference - it's like saying that Word is a bitmap painting package, and WordPerfect is a vector one.
Those are two differences off the top of my head. I'd say that switching from WordPerfect to Word could well require training, especially if these kinds of differences were ones you used a lot in your work.
Here's one practical example I found many years ago:
Word has no concept of right-justification within a line unless you use tabs. WordPerfect does. If you right-justify in WordPerfect and then change your margins, paper size or paper orientation then WordPerfect just handles it for you - the text snaps to the new margin with no effort required on your part.
When I had to use Word, I had to learn the tab-based workaround. And I had to change the formatting of some kinds of documents I produced, as switching from portrait to landscape meant much more extra work as I then had to change all the tab stops on those pages too.
(I eventually solved this by creating styles with the tab stops in them, one for each page orientation. But that solution took time to arrive at.)
Whether your word processor is Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org's Writer, AbiWord, or something else - any heavy use will likely expose you to some feature that either has no direct analogue in other products, or that works differently in them.
If all you ever do is write one-page letters with no real formatting beyond basic text appearance, right-justifying paragraphs and indenting text, then what I've written means nothing to you. You're in the 80% of people who use only 20% of the features. (Possibly even 90%/10% these days.)
For the other 20%, switching word processors will always mean retraining to some degree, as they find these differences by trail and error.
"Reading comprehension problems"?
Well, the best way to get someone understanding your point is of course to insult them. Preferably anonymously, as that way you definitely have the moral high ground.
That aside, yes, ActiveSync is a bonus for Apple when integrating. IBM should have something like ActiveSync - and should have had it some time ago.
However, there's a flip side: Domino is an application platform.
Getting data out of an NSF on a Domino server via HTTP is trivial - IBM could probably create the necessary views and agents to provide data for synchronising within a matter of days. The only part missing once that's done is the new message notification, which would likely require an amendment to the HTTP server itself - a point release of the Domino Server would fix that.
This isn't a technologically difficult issue. ActiveSync or no ActiveSync, the simple fact is that Apple never even approached IBM when considering the enterprise - despite the fact that IBM's Domino/Notes is estimated to have around 48% of enterprise messaging seats.
The lack of an equivalent technology to ActiveSync may have influenced that - but what exactly was stopping Apple from even asking? We've been told that they didn't. I find it difficult to believe that was just because there was no ActiveSync - Apple didn't even phone IBM to ask them if they could provide such a thing.
If Apple wanted integration with Domino/Notes, I think they could have had it. IBM would like it, but Apple's SDK doesn't allow it, so their hands are tied.
I'd like IBM to have an ActiveSync equivalent. As I've described, it needn't be that difficult for them.
But I don't see that it would have helped here - Apple made their decision, and that's that.
That's not what I read at Ed Brill's site...
What I read was lots of iPhone fanboys screaming that there was no enterprise sync with Domino/Notes, and that this would single-handedly kill the product as Corporate America spent the next month doing nothing but throwing out all phones for iPhones, and all mail systems for Exchange.
(That's why I call them fanboys - their reasoned analysis and reaction identifies them as such to me.)
IBM's response was (and had to be) "Apple didn't approach us about it, and we can't do it on our own as the SDK as shipped doesn't have the appropriate APIs exposed".
Basically, Apple chose to work with Microsoft only when it came to synching with Enterprise systems, and IBM has little control over that.
Now, IBM had _already_ been developing the iNotes Lite system that the NY Times article refers to.
The full iNotes webmail system is pretty good, but it's also a pretty complicated web application which only ran on a couple of supported browsing platforms - all desktop. (For example, until recently, it was actually IE only, with ActiveX components.)
To give people access to the basics no matter what the (modern) browser someone was using, iNotes Lite was developed. (The betas have been shown to work on the Opera browser of a Nintendo Wii, amongst other things.)
So this wasn't even really developed specifically for the iPhone. It's just the first thing that IBM have shipped which can work on an iPhone.
IBM may or may not be working with Apple to get more native integration working on the iPhone. But given how open and public Apple are, we likely wouldn't know until it ships.
But let's be clear - the real blocker is the lack of support from Apple. This isn't specific to IBM - my understanding is that if you wanted to write something that used SyncML to synchronise an iPhone and a Funambol server, you couldn't do it either. The SDK has no documented ways of doing access to the mail/calender/to-do application storage that would allow integration, so unless you can work with Apple directly you're stuck.
What's really interesting is that IBM's marketing is now spinning it as "The iPhone wasn't secure, this is".
That could be IBM giving up on Apple and just going with what they've got. Or it could be IBM toning their public reaction down from "Apple are crap and don't want to work with us" because they are working with Apple now.
Only time will tell.
I feel pretty sorry for IBM on this whole affair. The sheer hype around the iPhone makes this somehow a major story, when in the grand scheme of things - even within the computing world - it's actually rather a non-event...
The PowerPC's desktop presence was pretty much killed when Apple switched.
;-)
I don't think IBM makes an workstations that use the PPC chips anymore - but they still use the related POWER architecture in their higher end servers.
So on the desktop, it's dead.
In the device and embedded market, however, it's quite popular. It has an unusual niche "above" ARM and "below" x86, so to speak.
This is because it has higher performance capabilities and better integration with commodity computing hardware than most ARM chips can provide, whilst having lower power requirements and higher per-watt performance than X86 chips.
This article from IBM's developerWorks has two sections in which PPC is compared with X86 and ARM:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/pa-migrate/
It's not as biased as its IBM provenance might make you think, and provides a nice summary of the differences in real world usage.
As for where PPC is being used - well, you probably own a device with a PPC chip in it, and just don't know it.
They're used in vehicle management systems by Ford, they're in a wide variety of laser printers, they're used in some network/NAS devices.
Oh, and they're also used in all the current generation consoles, of course - so maybe you do own a PPC processor and knew it after all!
What does that even mean? How is "searching the view contents" different than "searching the document displayed in the view?"
;p
It means I'm not a trainer, and can't communicate ideas within my technical domain to those outside it without some occasional difficulties.
You have my apologies for that - I didn't mean to confuse!
What does it mean technically? Open up Gmail in Firefox, whilst you have the Find bar open.
If you use the Find bar, you'll only search the text on that page (the view contents).
If you go to the page's Search input area, it'll do a search of all the content in the current folder/view (for example the currently selected tag in Gmail, or the current folder in Notes.)
That's what it means. The difference between searching the summary data displayed, and the actual documents that those summaries would open.
Can you actually provide a specific example of why I would ever want to do that? I can't think of any problem that solves.
Notes has a huge heritage for supporting people that travel a lot. As such, a lot of the Locations system is designed to allow easy switching of servers and other configuration items.
One example of where you'd want to switch rendering paths would be when you're offline. One of the options (Notes with Internet Explorer, IIRC) allows for remote HTML elements to be cached locally for re-use.
Yes, IE does that. But IE didn't introduce decent offline working until after Notes did, and this is effectively what Notes is offering.
So, when you're in a hotel room and want to read mails offline without a loss of content, you'd want this.
Of course, if your job is one where you're either deskbound or don't travel long distances/multiple nights with a laptop, then the feature is far less useful.
Executives travel a lot. Salespeople travel a lot. And Notes is almost 20 years old, so it has a large heritage of features, many of which were there to solve problems long before the underlying operating systems or other products tried their hands at solving them.
I don't use it.
Yet you evidently feel qualified enough to comment on it at every opportunity.
Slashdotters vastly over-estimate the time it takes to re-train users
Time to re-train, time to support the re-training, time to roll out the product you're re-training on to thousands of desktops, time to find replacements to solutions that integrated into the product and integrate them into the new product...
Time is money.
Go to the CIO of a large company, and tell him you'd like to rip and replace the existing, working email system with another existing, working email system. Tell him it'll only cost a few million, maybe tens of millions at most. Tell him that doesn't include loss of productivity in staff as they adjust to the new system.
Guess what happens?
The fact is that migrations to/from mail systems have really slowed down of late. CIOs are becoming far better educated in the costs and the returns, and choosing not to migrate mail systems where possible. The only exceptions are mergers and acquisitions, where it's perhaps necessary.
The training costs may well be over-estimated, but if it were just training costs then entire chunks of my career would have consisted of me twiddling my thumbs doing nothing, rather than working 18 hour days over weekends to get things done.
If migrations were easy, then consultancies would be MUCH poorer...
Possibly.
On the other hand, maybe changing a password in a text/hash-storage based system (password files on unix, an entry in an LDAP database, the hash in AD) is trivial compared to changing the password in a secure public/private key system (Notes, GPG, X.509).
In which case, you'd be seeing the trees but not the forest.
Which was perhaps my point, albeit evidently badly made.
Ah, Blakey. Calling names so soon?
You usually wait until you've been proved wrong at least three times before that starts...
Yes, I know that Microsoft uses Exchange. That's one of its biggest problems, actually - all of their internal dogfooding and testing tends to assume the money-rich environment that Microsoft has.
That's why customers using the initial AD implementation found that large group updates swamped their lower-speed WAN links - Microsoft had evidently never tested it on a lower speed WAN link!
(It passed the WHOLE updated group across, not just the changes. A rather nasty surprise, especially if you reorganised an office and did many group updates. Which one large bank did, and caused some embarrassment.)
The history of Exchange Server is pretty much written in that story - Microsoft assumes you will use it as they do, in a "resource surplus rich" environment.
That's why up until Exchange 2000, Exchange required 128Kbits/s of dedicated bandwidth for it between sites and recommended 256Kbits/s, when many companies had no more than 64Kbits/s for all applications.
(Do you think that requirement went down or up with Exchange 2000? Actually, it stayed the same. But half the bandwidth had been shipped off to Active Directory, so in real terms it went up.)
Meanwhile, the minimum for Domino was "grab a modem, and see how it goes".
Microsoft can afford expensive log-shipping solutions for off-site clustering. Look at the Microsoft clustering solution, and ask yourself whether or not it was designed well? It's improved, but it's basically hardware-heavy and - for most products except SQL Server - has single points of failure in hardware.
Given how many Microsoft Cluster Services servers I've seen fail to failover, and how many man-hours I've seen spent tinkering with clusters to get them working, I'd say it was basically a very expensive failure as designs go. But it's the only option on the Windows platform, so "Microsoft uses it" is the glowing recommendation it gets.
I'm sorry, but "Microsoft uses Exchange" doesn't impress me. And 80,000 users on one cluster sounds like a highly suspect figure. In one Exchange environment, yes. But on one cluster? Someone's misheard, or is smoking something.
Or maybe all of those users are the Exchange admins they fired when they shipped 2003, and made it much more manageable. Yeah, that would be it - dormant accounts!
Come on, Blakey. You can do better than this, and we both know it...
OK, here we go:
:-)
"not work in version a, fixed in b, and broken again in c":
In the Notes client itself, or in an application that runs in Notes?
IBM does get a few regressions with each patch. (They're usually introduced when code is backported from a later version of Notes - e.g. the problem is fixed in 8, so they port the fix back to 7, but find that also brings back a bug that 7 needed a specific patch for.)
They have the massive task of shipping 3 updates per year for two concurrent versions across 6 server-side platforms and up to 3 client platforms, so it's regrettable but kind of inevitable.
If you could get an example SPR, it would be helpful - there may have been a workaround.
I'm afraid that's all I can say on that issue, so on to the next.
"Attachments from our ERP system's notification email process corrupt at random intervals on random individuals":
Now that is odd. From what you've said, I presume you mean documents launched from within Notes, and I can't say I've seen that. Has it been reported to IBM?
"We can't even use the SMTP gateway for our BI platform, since our Domino server doesn't like PDFs sent in via SMTP":
I've never heard of that. Can you send PDFs from other sources? It could be that the BI platform isn't encoding them correctly.
If you can receive PDFs from other mail sources without the same problems, then the problem isn't with Domino/Notes. Test that rigorously, and then call IBM support if you do find it's Domino/Notes.
"It generates errors if we use a dummy return address":
Finally, something I can give you decent pointers on!
Your Domino server just has some basic anti-spam configurations enabled, and they're conflicting with the ERP mails being sent.
Either create a real dummy address (using a mail-in database so that the SMTP address is valid, and then adding it to the allowed senders list) or modify your configuration.
Your Notes admin should be able to handle that eaily.
Sorry I couldn't help, but I did the best I could with the information given. If you can get more information, feel free to reply and I'll see what else I can do.
They've already documented the C API (for locally using the Notes DLLs to access Notes data/databases), provided a number of decent open protocol implementations (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, LDAP, HTTP, SOAP, WebDAV, DIIOP), and they don't lock/hide the design of the templates that they ship with Notes.
;-)
I'm not sure what more they could do...
Actually, I am sure. I think that the Notes APIs are Windows only, so making them available on Linux/Mac might be nice. Otherwise, though, just pushing to polish the HTTP server and get even more interoperability that way might be useful...
Office's versioning is quite different.
Versioning in Word isn't really appropriate. We're not talking about just having the text - we're talking about having a single point of reference (the application in Notes) that shows you the latest version and a history of changes.
If I send you a link to a document in such an application, then this is easy.
If I send you a Word document that's got loads of versions in it, how do you know it's the latest version? If you have many such emails, will it be easier or harder to find the latest usable draft?
Word's versioning is really geared towards collaborative editing within word. It does things like comparing documents. It's not an authoritative central versioning system though.
The versioning in Notes (and in any document management system, such as Documentum, DB2 Document Manager, etc.) is geared towards an accurate, authoritative revision history. As such, the versioning is often used in Notes applications alongside review workflow and document locking, to help make sure that the latest document version actually is.
WP did have versioning, but as a local add-in per machine - kind of like CVS really. The file format itself, IIRC, does not support versioning.
Then again, I'm not sure that the PowerPoint file format supports versioning (and I'm not about to go and check to be honest), so the advantage of a Notes application or a DMS would be that you can extend versioning to any file type provided you store it in the application - rather than just in Word or Excel.
Office also can't do cataloguing (unless you count "Windows Explorer shows me a list" as cataloguing), and its search indexing is more reliant on the Windows search engine than anything else. Useful if all your documents are local, less useful in other uses.
Again, for contrast, WordPerfect Office has its own per-machine index (via its QuickFind Indexer, if I recall correctly) but no cataloguing.
Based on previous experience, I'd imagine that most law firms will probably be using a document management system, and its ODMA plugin on the desktop for integration with Word/WordPerfect. Which means that all client-side features we've discussed here wouldn't be used.